Employment lawyers representing Fairfax Media are believed to be pushing for the imprisonment or other punishment of a Sydney man for contempt of court for filming and asking them questions after they had left the Federal Court. This has raised eyebrows in media circles, because he was doing no more than Fairfax Media’s own journalists do every day outside courts and other workplaces.
Shane Dowling who worked for Fairfax Media before – he says – being unlawfully sacked by the company has represented himself against the company’s high-priced lawyers from Freehills – a highly regarded firm known for aggressively representing the interests of employers – and has made some big claims against the company, the lawyers and even judicial officials involved in the case. Most of them are far too racy, even for us.
An affidavit obtained by VEXNEWS sworn by a Freehills lawyer Shiv Jhinku explains what happened outside the court. Even accepting his story entirely, it has hard to tell how Mr Dowling’s actions differ in any respect from the actions of journalists working at Fairfax Media.
JOURNOS JUST AS RUDE AS FORMER FAIRFAXISTA DOWLING
Dowling’s questions sound very direct, even rude and most probably fantastic. But his conduct – in the video now freely available online – seemed perfectly appropriate for the occasion. He maintained a reasonable distance from those he was questioning and only asked them a few questions in any event over thirty seconds or so. He did so in order to add it to his website. Folks refusing to answer questions is not necessarily the most edifying thing but many other outlets – particularly at Fairfax – would say that in certain circumstances a failure to respond to questions implies something ominous.
We looked carefully at the video, Mr Dowling’s often outrageous claims and the affidavit and can’t see how his behaviour differs substantially from any of Dowling’s former colleagues at Fairfax Media. Anyone seeing feral Fairfaxista Farrah Tomazin at a doorstep would have encountered far more odious conduct than is outlined in Mr Jhinku’s affidavit.
Indeed, behaving badly is not restricted to Fairfax Media scribes either. A former scribbler at The Australian who couldn’t hack the fast pace of its Higher Education Supplement, Louise Perry ended up spinning Socialist Left minister Peter Batchelor. Critics said she had all the charm of a rampaging boar.
Not quite cutting it as a journalist, it was fortunate her dear old mum was an influential battle-axe at the powerful Metal Workers union back in Perth, able to pull a few strings, as Mums should and pulled her a cushy job in the Victorian government media unit. When leaving the employ of a Socialist Left minister, she didn’t last very long in the media unit and has only recently emerged heading the astoundingly large media outfit of supposed charity Oxfam where sources claim she is paid in excess of $100,000Â leaching off the world’s poorest people.
That little rant might seem something of a digression but it’s not. Perry is a real pig. If it didn’t make her look like more of one, she’d no doubt love to shut us down too. But she can’t. We rarely turn our mind to her shameful exploits. When we do, we defame her, to be sure, but our remarks are always true and speak to issues of public concern exploring themes of faux sanctimony, hypocrisy, nepotism, strong body odour and such. So she’s free to hate, but isn’t able to shut us down. As it should be.
That’s because a free society needs a free press, speaking truth to powerful people like her. We like to think we do so responsibly, with a pre-occupation for getting facts right.
Increasingly we see the courts abused by those desperate to silence critics.
Is it always a nice process giving targets free character assessments? No. Fair? That depends on your point of view. Sometimes telling the unvarnished, harsh truth can seem very unfair indeed to those on the receiving end.
And that’s where we return to Freehills lawyer Mr Shiv “Glassjaw” Jhinku who has sworn on oath that because Dowling filmed him and asked him questions while he was walking down the street and then published the video that:
“I have concerns about my physical safety… (and has) concerns about what other actions the Applicant may do next in an attempt to harass, intimidate and embarrass (Freehills lawyers)”
Come on. That’s crazy. Perhaps nearly as unwise as litigants accusing judicial officers of taking bungs, which Mr Dowling appears to do with distressing regularity.
GLASSJAW JHINKU’S JIHAD
Jhinku’s autobiography on LinkedIn says he has worked at the Freehills mega firm for nearly a decade, before that he was a student leader of sorts, as the President of Griffith University Law Society. And yet despite that he claims he was intimidated and embarrassed by a camera?
He has sworn it on oath, but it beggars belief. Freehills are regarded – at least in the union movement – as the biggest, baddest boss’s law firm in the land. We cannot help but feel “Glass jaw” Jhinku might be letting the tough team of worker wranglers down a tad.
Other than suing Fairfax Media and litigating the matter in a manner that could be best described as exotic, it is clear that Dowling did nothing of a threatening, harassing or intimidating kind to anyone. He has merely done what Fairfax and other journalists do by asking pesky questions and reporting on the answers (or non-answers) and separately exercised his rights as a litigant in the courts.
Not done with pursuing Dowling in court with dubious claims about threats to his physical safety and complaints he felt embarrassed – presumably at the expense of Fairfax Media shareholders – his affidavit reveals that Jhinku launched a personal anti-free-speech jihad against various video hosts where Dowling had uploaded his video. A number of them, notably Youtube, removed the video as a result of Jhinku’s complaint
Normally we’d be happy to broadcast it ourselves but we won’t because it doesn’t add much. We’re sure you’ll be able to find it if you look but if it was up to Fairfax Media and the lawyers they pay very well indeed with shareholders’ money, they’d censor it in a way their journalists would condemn if it was a foreign regime or a local government suppressing a dissenter and critic.
We will certainly be keeping a close eye on Freehills behaviour in relation to this important free speech issue.
ANOTHER TYRANT ANOTHER TIME
They would do well to remember the highly amusing case of now discredited Liquidator Dean McVeigh who sought a Supreme Court judge’s order that the publisher of a website questioning his honesty and probity be jailed for contempt of court.
The Sunday Age reported:
The judge said that attempts by Mr McVeigh to silence a critic were “ill-judged” and akin “to using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut”.
Particularly relevant in this matter was that the judge also thought the publisher had gone in very hard like Dowling:
Justice Hollingworth said his publications were “frequently intemperate, repetitive and immature. He is doggedly persistent and seems to have plenty of time on his hands to publish criticisms of the liquidator. “He displays some of the zealousness of a crusader, which no doubt makes him difficult for the liquidator’s lawyers to deal with.”
The judge further condemned McVeigh for wasting the court’s time with such applications and having evaluated the claims that McVeigh was spending a lot of creditors’ money on activities unlikely to generate a commercial return for creditors, found that there was a substantial degree of truth to the claims. Still to this day, McVeigh has not accounted for the many millions of dollars he spent in the Melbourne University Student Union liquidation that helped fund his fleet of luxury cars.
Being intemperate, repetitive, immature, zealous and dogged didn’t negate McVeigh’s many critics’ right to free speech. Nor should it in the Dowling case.
Supposedly busy TAFE worker and deposed Melbourne Councillor Liberal lefty Catherine Ng found time to sit in for quite a while today on Victorian Legislative Assembly Question Time. Was she checking up on wayward hubby Douglas Campbell, believed to be increasingly unhappy about life or as some suggested perhaps was there to eye off Robert Clark’s seat of Box Hill and see what it’s like to be among the legislators.
VEXNEWS (Archive) 
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